for example, the reason we concentrate on music by dead white europeans from 1700-1900 may include a cultural bias, not just technical
We concentrate on the dead white men because it so happens that dead white men wrote modern musical theory. There were other musical traditions, but the dead white men, in terms of this article, are the ones who stumbled upon the rich musical space that we now mostly occupy. (History shows there was a lot of resistance on this front at the time.) As is so often the case, being the first they had the most to map out. They were done before anybody else really got into the act.
It is worth pointing out that "white men" is a bit of an unfair characterization, as if it were some sort of exclusive enterprise; in the 18th and 19th century, having significant influences and contributions from everybody from England to Russia qualifies as a pretty diverse endeavor. It's not like the collaboration and communication of the modern world was in place.
Nowadays, nobody owns it. I've listened to music from all over the world, and everybody has freely appropriated the 12-tone equal temperament scale, and put their own spins on it. (One of my favorite pieces that is interesting this way is a Japanese cover of a Beatles song with clear modern European continental techno influences. Now that's culture.:) )
Well, Star Trek is fiction, and doesn't take into account relativity.
Actually, the point was to take into account relativity. There is no unique "simultaneous" between two distant places, but you are free to define a "now". It's just that the universe won't respect it; the mere definition of a "now" won't prevent the usual litany of FTL paradoxes, which Star Trek (and all TV science fiction) generally just ignore... what else can they do?
This isn't fiction, we already do this. We have several systems that have tight enough tolerances that we need to define a "now" that is much more precise than the lightspeed communication delays inherent in the system. The GPS system is one of the more well-documented instances of that; the entire system needs to share a "now" to much greater precision than they could hope to directly communicate, and we don't have a problem defining a useful "now" for the system.
text is more easily readable, it easily gets blurry on an lcd.
That's, like, physically impossible. LCDs can't be "blurry" without major malfunction, unlike CRTs which can be progressively more blurry over time. If you've got "blurry" text, you're running it at the wrong resolution.
(I have seen at least one LCD that had such a major malfunction. It blew out a few days later.)
You can consider the ability of a CRT to be "native" in multiple resolutions an advantage, but it's not like anybody's hiding the fact you need to drive an LCD at its native resolution.
(I'm much less convinced about that being an advantage than I used to be. In the days where you could pick between 320x200 "crappy small" and 640x480 "less crappy still small" on a 12" monitor, it worked well. When you've got a 23" monitor, it doesn't matter how "native" the CRT is; 640x480 looks pretty much equally bad on CRTs and LCDs. LCDs are getting better about having on-board resampling, too; my recent Samsung LCD TV does a decent job of upsampling all on its own, we do not get "blocks of doom", no matter what I feed into it.)
The sad part is it has taken this long for the military to remember that it's the guys on the ground that are actually seeing what is happening, and can provide a lot of useful information if they are just listened to. Giving them the ability to update databases with what they see should help save lives down the road.
Actually, if you've been reading some of the more non-traditional news sources, you'd know this isn't a sudden change in course, but a continuing refinement of stuff they've been working on for years.
Try to track down one of the detailed stories of how they identified where Saddam was hiding. Not a newspaper account, but a detailed story about it. They did not, as you might assume, get a tip that said "Hey, Saddam is here!" (Or rather, they have way too many such tips.) It was actually a clever approach where they graphed his network of associates, figured out where he was most likely to take shelter, applied carefully-placed pressure to narrow down the options (both in the sense of locating him, and in the sense of corralling him), and eventually fingered his location through logic and information gathering.
I think the news reporters don't report this stuff because they don't really understand it. If they did, they'd be much more panicky about the capabilities the military has been developing. Personally, while most people are screaming and worrying about half-imaginary infractions by the Bush administration, I find myself a little concerned not at how bad our military is at putting down insurgencies, but at how good at it they are getting. Not the usual story line, I know, but one better supported by the actual evidence, IMHO.
For example, you can copyright in the look of a new Ford as well as patent some aspect of its design.
"Aspect" is the key word here. You can't patent the look of the Ford, nor can you copyright a patentable aspect of the design. They cover different aspects, even if they are both aspects of the same thing.
In the case of software, there's no such distinction. One-click is covered both by copyright and patent. There's no distinction in "aspect" here; the same exact code doing the same exact thing is covered in both cases, specifically because the patents are intruding where they shouldn't be.
XHTML makes heavy use of it, at least in theory. XMPP makes heavy use of it, in practice.
XML really is one of the best solution for heterogenous documents or streams that consist of several standardized components stuck together in a standard way. Few people may use it that way, but it does it reasonably well, and there's virtually no competition in that space. (Yeah, in theory you could encode it in a number of other formats, but not in a standard way.)
Of course, the real problem per the other threads, is whether this is even feasible at all. It looks like this dude just made up some numbers and other people gave him an award based on his fake numbers.
If you were wondering why I referred to "true environmentalism" in my message, if you're wondering why I felt like "environmentalism" needed a qualifier like that, it's because of the environmentalism that gives out awards for things like being three orders of magnitude off on your physics.
In addition, a lamp that requires 50lbs. of anything doesn't sound green on the construction side.
Which just goes to show how little you should trust your intuition or feelings when it comes to true environmentalism.
We live on a 13,170,856,500,000,000,000,000,000 pound rock. Are you sure that 50 pounds of mass is going to break Gaia?
50 pounds of something in particular could be an environmental problem. 50 pounds of mercury would be horrible. But just "50 pounds" is nothing. Personally, I'd love to have this lamp shipped to me without any weights at all, and I'll just scrounge up the requisite 50lbs of mass. Maybe just ship it with some buckets to hold rocks or sand or dirt; I've got all of the above in abundence. Better than shipping 50 pounds around, which even without analyzing the environmental impact, is going to cost me $$$.
What does that have to do with my question? Why does software need both patents and copyright? I can't see any reference to patents in your post. I just see a defense of copyright. (Which happens to be my position, that copyright is sufficient.)
Yes. XML was formalized. It is strictly defined and easy to check for compliance (with the right tools). Only a little bit of the definition has passed out of common usage, mostly focused around DTDs.
If you encounter a file that claims to be XML, but does not meet the XML standard, then it is not the XML standard that is to blame. The claim is wrong and the file is not XML.
XML is not a fuzzy-wuzzy adjective that can be applied willy-nilly to anything and magically turn it into "XML". It is not a marketing term or English Professor term. It is a rigidly specified engineer term for a document format, and a given document is XML if and only if it meets that format.
If someone wants to hack together a half-assed parser or emitter of any language, they will. I've seen half-assed XML parsers, I've seen half-assed JSON parsers, I've seen half-assed HTML parsers, I've seen half-assed YAML parsers, I've seen... you get the idea. If a standard can't solve the problem, you can't count the lack of solution against it.
What is badly needed is some sort of patent reform that prevents non-specific or non-original patents. You should be able to patent a thing. You shouldn't be able to patent the idea of doing whatever that thing does.
We have that. It's called "copyright".
Why is software so special that it's the only thing that I know of covered by both copyright and extensive patents?
(Is it really so surprising that the union of copyright and patent law produces a mess? They were never designed to cover the same domain.)
The bit that's missing from this article, and that completes the explanation of why this is interesting, is the question of information.
One of the open questions facing physics is whether the event horizon of a black hole destroys information. It's not just the event horizon itself that is interesting, the destruction of information is by itself a legitimately interesting question by itself.
If we can create an optical event horizon that also seems to destroy information, this may allow us to witness how the Universe responds to such information destruction. This is radically easier than creating a large enough black hole to observe these effects. Black hole horizons are interesting in many ways; this may allow us to extract and experiment on one aspect of them.
I've seen a few proposals for the creation of an optical black hole, this is the first claim I've seen that someone may have actually created one.
Given the multi-dimensional nature of "fascism" (not the best word, but we'll use it), that is, you can't just create a "fascism index number" and compare two places with a simple integer comparison, it is far more fair to say that both entities are blazing their own paths in this direction, neither particularly leading nor particularly following.
In which case you have to follow them and engage in a chess match.
I never said it was easy. I'm just saying the simpler metric is worthless.
Besides, in most cases, the whole "Ah, but you knew I'd do X so I would have done X-prime, except that you knew I'd think that so I in fact did do X" seems to be overplayed. It's easy to write a Hollywood movie that does that. In the real world, organizations seem pretty lucky to get to the correct "We should do X" in the first place. (In fact, one of the tricky things is working out what the real goal of an organization is; it often isn't what they state, nor even necessarily what they think.) The counter-counter-counter-counter-move-in-advance too often gets side-tracked by the complexity of the real world; the ability to pull it off is inversely proportional to the number of people involved and drops rapidly after 5 or 10 or so.
You're still more likely to get to a correct result than you are with the stupid metric, which leaves you adrift in an infinite series of possibilities, constructing whatever scenario your fevered brain can come up with with no ability to come up with counterevidence for any of the scenarios.
(Also interesting is the number of people who don't realize how badly the real world screws up such complicated plans. I do not believe in a conspiracy of five people running the world. I do believe there are sets of such people out there who believe they are running the world, who perhaps even have real power, but grossly overestimate the real power they have. The real world is chaotic beyond belief, beyond comprehension.)
The measure of a theory of behavior is not "Does this action/occurrence further the given goal?", but "Given a hypothesis that group X is pursuing goal Y, is the action Z the best action X can take?"
Let's take the goal of "cutting off Iran's information before an attack by the US". Does cutting the cables in this manner "further that goal"? Yes, it does. However, given that goal, would the US military consider this its best action? Hell no! If the US Military wants to cut off your internet, they're not going to give you a lead time of several days; they're going to cut off all your links within minutes, possibly seconds of each other.
Are extremist Middle Eastern groups cutting off the cables to cut off Western influences? They would lack the capabilities to cut all cables at once, but I also suspect they'd know this was a brutally short-term situation. Most such people seem to believe that standard authoritarian government techniques are a better choice. I can't quite rule this one out as thoroughly, but it would have to be an awfully small, insular group to think this is the best choice.
The problem with the standard metric of "does it further this goal" is that it leaves you with an excessive abundance of theories, which can't all be true, but can't be ruled out by that metric. Every event further numerous goals and sets back numerous other ones. You really need to be looking at what people consider their best actions; that tends to be much more constrained and much more accurate. Less fun if you need to see conspiracies everywhere though, but that's the price you pay for caring about truth.
And so on. So far, I haven't really heard a good conspiracy theory yet, so I'm still judging natural event as the most likely, pending more information.
Well, what "viable" really truly means is "able to be supported by enough real voters to make it into office". "Real voters", in contrast to the vast horde of just-like-you voters that exist only in your mind.
You are free in a democracy to vote for whomever you like, but confining yourself to "viable" voters is indicative of the kind of maturity it takes to function in a democracy (by which I mean any system with a major democratic component, including the US Republic), which requires understanding that a lot of people don't agree with you.
This anger about people seeking "viability" strikes me as coming awfully close to a totalitarian impulse. What, am I just supposed to ignore the fact that I'm in the minority and angrily push my views through anyhow? No.
There are a lot of very crappy (IMHO) libraries that do nothing but wrap the XML and present it to you in some form, leaving it entirely up to you to do, well, everything else.
If you are enough of a programmer to deal with Jabber, which means being comfortable with XML, this is by far the easiest bit of working with Jabber. All the tricky bits like connecting and stuff are the harder bits worth writing a library for.
Look for a library that handles:
Connecting to a server, with encryption (SSL or STARTTLS upgrade), with just the JID, password, and an optional hostname/ip override
Some decent story about how to create an account if login fails
Callbacks for message and presence that A: Give you the relevant information about the presence packets and messages in a nice format but also B: gives you direct access to the full XML stanza in case you want to pull other stuff out of it. (In fact, you should always have the XML in some parsed format.)
The ability to register callbacks for IQ stuff so that you aren't implementing an event loop yourself. (Bonus points if it integrates with the event loop of your GUI toolkit.) Closures in your language are awesome here.
Some code in the library to work with rosters.
Some way to extend the library in a principled manner to support other XMPP functionality, since no library is going to have everything.
That's really a bare minimum, IMHO.
Libraries that just give me parsed XML hunks piss me off, but unfortunately this seems to be the standard definition of "an XMPP library". Connecting to a known account and sending a message to a known JID ought to be a two-four line task at most.
They told you their theory in the article, that the ratings can't "see" the large group watching the TV.
I said I don't agree with the theory, because unless at least one of the "large group" viewers is a Nielson family, it doesn't matter anyhow. Ratings people do not actually count the real number of people watching the show, after all, and a one-time special-event correction for the Super Bowl is hardly uncalled for.
Ultimately, this is just a power play. In light of the absence of licenses to show in groups that I mentioned, it's a particularly pointless one too.
Since the only practical use of a broadcast is to view it, isn't such viewing (at least non-commercially) "fair use?"
It sounds like it's time for another not-so-gentle reminder that contrary to the pontifications of Slashdot lawyers, "fair use" is not a legal magic wand that you can wave to make things legal, and "fair use" certainly doesn't have anything to do with the conventional idea of "fair". Nor does "common sense" = "fair use". (Let alone the clearly-popular idea that "things I want to do" = "fair use"....)
This is why the NFL made a point that advertising revenues are affected; one of the four main tests of fair use is how much damage is done financially.
(Not to say that I necessarily agree with the NFL. And one wonders why they don't just create a standardized system for people to purchase licenses for these parties, given their obvious popularity... although I'm sure we'd all be shocked at what the NFL thinks a Superbowl viewing is worth....)
But, at th same time it's rather frightening the though of someone with an intellect like that with a lot of time on their hands and no productive outlet to use it.
What evidence do you have that there was "no productive outlet to use it"? The kid had the time and the knowhow to do this, and you think this was somehow his only choice for expression?
If you really think you can personally add whatever feature you fancy to any and all open-source software in anything like a reasonable timescale, I suspect you've never tried. I'd really like emacs to display all regexes properly (# is a particular problem in both perl and tcl modes). The bug has been around for years, and I'm sure tens of thousands of technical users have noticed. Can you fix that for me by next Wednesday?
How much are you willing to pay?
The argument is that you are allowed to change the source of open source software. Your counterargument is that it might not be easy. Well, that's not the argument. You can change the source. It might be a trivial fix. You might have to hire an expensive team of developers for a year. But you can, and if you need it enough, you will.
It doesn't matter what expensive team of developers you hire to modify Windows; they can't (legally) do it. If Windows was open source, you can. (Businesses are still left with a manpower advantage here; I think this argument gets more compelling the more people you have available to make changes.)
Obviously, the pain of the bug you cite has not risen above the threshold where you're actually willing to do something about it. But with open source, you have that choice, even if you have not chosen to exercise it because it's too expensive.
It's not about it being "easy", it's about it being possible.
'Abort, Retry, Fail?' was the phrase some wormdog scrawled next to the door of the Edit Universe project room. And when the new dataspinners started working, fabricating their worlds on the huge organic comp systems, we'd remind them: if you see this message, always choose 'Retry.'
It astonishes me how people are capable about bitching about every single year, and never notice the contradiction of every year being crappy, while this year is better than the one several years ago.
IT and tech is the worst. Oh, piss piss, moan moan, life sucks... except for the surprisingly affordable HDTVs, the free fall of per-gigabyte hard drive costs, the near-inability to buy non-dual-core CPUs, $200 laptops that do really useful things, the "gigabyte" being the new standard measurement of a RAM stick and the $10 bill being the new standard increment of its pricing, entire hardware categories like "MP3 players" that didn't exist a few years ago and in another couple of years will be given away free in cereal boxes, and on it goes.
Crappy year after crappy year after crappy year... yet somehow, here we are and you'd have to drag me kicking and screaming back to the year 2000's technology. Somehow, the "crappy year" math doesn't add up.
(This applies in other domains too, but that is left as an exercise to the reader to avoid topic drift. Note that only tech has the exponential improvement, though.)
Slashdot Mirror
It is worth pointing out that "white men" is a bit of an unfair characterization, as if it were some sort of exclusive enterprise; in the 18th and 19th century, having significant influences and contributions from everybody from England to Russia qualifies as a pretty diverse endeavor. It's not like the collaboration and communication of the modern world was in place.
Nowadays, nobody owns it. I've listened to music from all over the world, and everybody has freely appropriated the 12-tone equal temperament scale, and put their own spins on it. (One of my favorite pieces that is interesting this way is a Japanese cover of a Beatles song with clear modern European continental techno influences. Now that's culture.
This isn't fiction, we already do this. We have several systems that have tight enough tolerances that we need to define a "now" that is much more precise than the lightspeed communication delays inherent in the system. The GPS system is one of the more well-documented instances of that; the entire system needs to share a "now" to much greater precision than they could hope to directly communicate, and we don't have a problem defining a useful "now" for the system.
(I have seen at least one LCD that had such a major malfunction. It blew out a few days later.)
You can consider the ability of a CRT to be "native" in multiple resolutions an advantage, but it's not like anybody's hiding the fact you need to drive an LCD at its native resolution.
(I'm much less convinced about that being an advantage than I used to be. In the days where you could pick between 320x200 "crappy small" and 640x480 "less crappy still small" on a 12" monitor, it worked well. When you've got a 23" monitor, it doesn't matter how "native" the CRT is; 640x480 looks pretty much equally bad on CRTs and LCDs. LCDs are getting better about having on-board resampling, too; my recent Samsung LCD TV does a decent job of upsampling all on its own, we do not get "blocks of doom", no matter what I feed into it.)
Try to track down one of the detailed stories of how they identified where Saddam was hiding. Not a newspaper account, but a detailed story about it. They did not, as you might assume, get a tip that said "Hey, Saddam is here!" (Or rather, they have way too many such tips.) It was actually a clever approach where they graphed his network of associates, figured out where he was most likely to take shelter, applied carefully-placed pressure to narrow down the options (both in the sense of locating him, and in the sense of corralling him), and eventually fingered his location through logic and information gathering.
I think the news reporters don't report this stuff because they don't really understand it. If they did, they'd be much more panicky about the capabilities the military has been developing. Personally, while most people are screaming and worrying about half-imaginary infractions by the Bush administration, I find myself a little concerned not at how bad our military is at putting down insurgencies, but at how good at it they are getting. Not the usual story line, I know, but one better supported by the actual evidence, IMHO.
In the case of software, there's no such distinction. One-click is covered both by copyright and patent. There's no distinction in "aspect" here; the same exact code doing the same exact thing is covered in both cases, specifically because the patents are intruding where they shouldn't be.
XHTML makes heavy use of it, at least in theory. XMPP makes heavy use of it, in practice.
XML really is one of the best solution for heterogenous documents or streams that consist of several standardized components stuck together in a standard way. Few people may use it that way, but it does it reasonably well, and there's virtually no competition in that space. (Yeah, in theory you could encode it in a number of other formats, but not in a standard way.)
Of course, the real problem per the other threads, is whether this is even feasible at all. It looks like this dude just made up some numbers and other people gave him an award based on his fake numbers.
If you were wondering why I referred to "true environmentalism" in my message, if you're wondering why I felt like "environmentalism" needed a qualifier like that, it's because of the environmentalism that gives out awards for things like being three orders of magnitude off on your physics.
We live on a 13,170,856,500,000,000,000,000,000 pound rock. Are you sure that 50 pounds of mass is going to break Gaia?
50 pounds of something in particular could be an environmental problem. 50 pounds of mercury would be horrible. But just "50 pounds" is nothing. Personally, I'd love to have this lamp shipped to me without any weights at all, and I'll just scrounge up the requisite 50lbs of mass. Maybe just ship it with some buckets to hold rocks or sand or dirt; I've got all of the above in abundence. Better than shipping 50 pounds around, which even without analyzing the environmental impact, is going to cost me $$$.
What does that have to do with my question? Why does software need both patents and copyright? I can't see any reference to patents in your post. I just see a defense of copyright. (Which happens to be my position, that copyright is sufficient.)
Yes. XML was formalized. It is strictly defined and easy to check for compliance (with the right tools). Only a little bit of the definition has passed out of common usage, mostly focused around DTDs.
... you get the idea. If a standard can't solve the problem, you can't count the lack of solution against it.
If you encounter a file that claims to be XML, but does not meet the XML standard, then it is not the XML standard that is to blame. The claim is wrong and the file is not XML.
XML is not a fuzzy-wuzzy adjective that can be applied willy-nilly to anything and magically turn it into "XML". It is not a marketing term or English Professor term. It is a rigidly specified engineer term for a document format, and a given document is XML if and only if it meets that format.
If someone wants to hack together a half-assed parser or emitter of any language, they will. I've seen half-assed XML parsers, I've seen half-assed JSON parsers, I've seen half-assed HTML parsers, I've seen half-assed YAML parsers, I've seen
Why is software so special that it's the only thing that I know of covered by both copyright and extensive patents?
(Is it really so surprising that the union of copyright and patent law produces a mess? They were never designed to cover the same domain.)
The bit that's missing from this article, and that completes the explanation of why this is interesting, is the question of information.
One of the open questions facing physics is whether the event horizon of a black hole destroys information. It's not just the event horizon itself that is interesting, the destruction of information is by itself a legitimately interesting question by itself.
If we can create an optical event horizon that also seems to destroy information, this may allow us to witness how the Universe responds to such information destruction. This is radically easier than creating a large enough black hole to observe these effects. Black hole horizons are interesting in many ways; this may allow us to extract and experiment on one aspect of them.
I've seen a few proposals for the creation of an optical black hole, this is the first claim I've seen that someone may have actually created one.
Given the multi-dimensional nature of "fascism" (not the best word, but we'll use it), that is, you can't just create a "fascism index number" and compare two places with a simple integer comparison, it is far more fair to say that both entities are blazing their own paths in this direction, neither particularly leading nor particularly following.
In which case you have to follow them and engage in a chess match.
I never said it was easy. I'm just saying the simpler metric is worthless.
Besides, in most cases, the whole "Ah, but you knew I'd do X so I would have done X-prime, except that you knew I'd think that so I in fact did do X" seems to be overplayed. It's easy to write a Hollywood movie that does that. In the real world, organizations seem pretty lucky to get to the correct "We should do X" in the first place. (In fact, one of the tricky things is working out what the real goal of an organization is; it often isn't what they state, nor even necessarily what they think.) The counter-counter-counter-counter-move-in-advance too often gets side-tracked by the complexity of the real world; the ability to pull it off is inversely proportional to the number of people involved and drops rapidly after 5 or 10 or so.
You're still more likely to get to a correct result than you are with the stupid metric, which leaves you adrift in an infinite series of possibilities, constructing whatever scenario your fevered brain can come up with with no ability to come up with counterevidence for any of the scenarios.
(Also interesting is the number of people who don't realize how badly the real world screws up such complicated plans. I do not believe in a conspiracy of five people running the world. I do believe there are sets of such people out there who believe they are running the world, who perhaps even have real power, but grossly overestimate the real power they have. The real world is chaotic beyond belief, beyond comprehension.)
The measure of a theory of behavior is not "Does this action/occurrence further the given goal?", but "Given a hypothesis that group X is pursuing goal Y, is the action Z the best action X can take?"
Let's take the goal of "cutting off Iran's information before an attack by the US". Does cutting the cables in this manner "further that goal"? Yes, it does. However, given that goal, would the US military consider this its best action? Hell no! If the US Military wants to cut off your internet, they're not going to give you a lead time of several days; they're going to cut off all your links within minutes, possibly seconds of each other.
Are extremist Middle Eastern groups cutting off the cables to cut off Western influences? They would lack the capabilities to cut all cables at once, but I also suspect they'd know this was a brutally short-term situation. Most such people seem to believe that standard authoritarian government techniques are a better choice. I can't quite rule this one out as thoroughly, but it would have to be an awfully small, insular group to think this is the best choice.
The problem with the standard metric of "does it further this goal" is that it leaves you with an excessive abundance of theories, which can't all be true, but can't be ruled out by that metric. Every event further numerous goals and sets back numerous other ones. You really need to be looking at what people consider their best actions; that tends to be much more constrained and much more accurate. Less fun if you need to see conspiracies everywhere though, but that's the price you pay for caring about truth.
And so on. So far, I haven't really heard a good conspiracy theory yet, so I'm still judging natural event as the most likely, pending more information.
Well, what "viable" really truly means is "able to be supported by enough real voters to make it into office". "Real voters", in contrast to the vast horde of just-like-you voters that exist only in your mind.
You are free in a democracy to vote for whomever you like, but confining yourself to "viable" voters is indicative of the kind of maturity it takes to function in a democracy (by which I mean any system with a major democratic component, including the US Republic), which requires understanding that a lot of people don't agree with you.
This anger about people seeking "viability" strikes me as coming awfully close to a totalitarian impulse. What, am I just supposed to ignore the fact that I'm in the minority and angrily push my views through anyhow? No.
It's not a sign of degeneracy. It's maturity.
If you are enough of a programmer to deal with Jabber, which means being comfortable with XML, this is by far the easiest bit of working with Jabber. All the tricky bits like connecting and stuff are the harder bits worth writing a library for.
Look for a library that handles:
- Connecting to a server, with encryption (SSL or STARTTLS upgrade), with just the JID, password, and an optional hostname/ip override
- Some decent story about how to create an account if login fails
- Callbacks for message and presence that A: Give you the relevant information about the presence packets and messages in a nice format but also B: gives you direct access to the full XML stanza in case you want to pull other stuff out of it. (In fact, you should always have the XML in some parsed format.)
- The ability to register callbacks for IQ stuff so that you aren't implementing an event loop yourself. (Bonus points if it integrates with the event loop of your GUI toolkit.) Closures in your language are awesome here.
- Some code in the library to work with rosters.
- Some way to extend the library in a principled manner to support other XMPP functionality, since no library is going to have everything.
That's really a bare minimum, IMHO.Libraries that just give me parsed XML hunks piss me off, but unfortunately this seems to be the standard definition of "an XMPP library". Connecting to a known account and sending a message to a known JID ought to be a two-four line task at most.
They told you their theory in the article, that the ratings can't "see" the large group watching the TV.
I said I don't agree with the theory, because unless at least one of the "large group" viewers is a Nielson family, it doesn't matter anyhow. Ratings people do not actually count the real number of people watching the show, after all, and a one-time special-event correction for the Super Bowl is hardly uncalled for.
Ultimately, this is just a power play. In light of the absence of licenses to show in groups that I mentioned, it's a particularly pointless one too.
This is why the NFL made a point that advertising revenues are affected; one of the four main tests of fair use is how much damage is done financially.
(Not to say that I necessarily agree with the NFL. And one wonders why they don't just create a standardized system for people to purchase licenses for these parties, given their obvious popularity... although I'm sure we'd all be shocked at what the NFL thinks a Superbowl viewing is worth....)
It's about as likely.
"Here, let me show you my demo of this amazing, super-HD display system... on YouTube."
I doubt that.
The argument is that you are allowed to change the source of open source software. Your counterargument is that it might not be easy. Well, that's not the argument. You can change the source. It might be a trivial fix. You might have to hire an expensive team of developers for a year. But you can, and if you need it enough, you will.
It doesn't matter what expensive team of developers you hire to modify Windows; they can't (legally) do it. If Windows was open source, you can. (Businesses are still left with a manpower advantage here; I think this argument gets more compelling the more people you have available to make changes.)
Obviously, the pain of the bug you cite has not risen above the threshold where you're actually willing to do something about it. But with open source, you have that choice, even if you have not chosen to exercise it because it's too expensive.
It's not about it being "easy", it's about it being possible.
'Abort, Retry, Fail?' was the phrase some wormdog scrawled next to the door of the Edit Universe project room. And when the new dataspinners started working, fabricating their worlds on the huge organic comp systems, we'd remind them: if you see this message, always choose 'Retry.'
Bad'l Ron, Wakener - Morgan Polysoft
(Why? Excellent reasons.)
It astonishes me how people are capable about bitching about every single year, and never notice the contradiction of every year being crappy, while this year is better than the one several years ago.
IT and tech is the worst. Oh, piss piss, moan moan, life sucks... except for the surprisingly affordable HDTVs, the free fall of per-gigabyte hard drive costs, the near-inability to buy non-dual-core CPUs, $200 laptops that do really useful things, the "gigabyte" being the new standard measurement of a RAM stick and the $10 bill being the new standard increment of its pricing, entire hardware categories like "MP3 players" that didn't exist a few years ago and in another couple of years will be given away free in cereal boxes, and on it goes.
Crappy year after crappy year after crappy year... yet somehow, here we are and you'd have to drag me kicking and screaming back to the year 2000's technology. Somehow, the "crappy year" math doesn't add up.
(This applies in other domains too, but that is left as an exercise to the reader to avoid topic drift. Note that only tech has the exponential improvement, though.)